In sports, everyone is a winner—some people just win better than others. Like all those people writing all those "year of the pitcher" stories, for whom Matt Garza's no-hitter provided more anecdotal evidence of a trend that probably doesn't exist.

Even looking at the past decade, 2010 doesn't seem particularly anomalous. We have a dropoff in runs per game per team of .16, just as we did in 2002. (What does stand out is the change from 2000 to 2001, when, as Tom Tango points out, baseball once again started calling the high strike.) Baseball's power factor — a favorite metric of our old pal and proto-Moneyballer Eric Walker, measuring total bases per hit — is right around 1.566. That's the lowest since 1995, but not so low that it suggests any permanent tectonic shifts in the game, as Baseball Prospectus's Jay Jaffe notes. Here's Tango again (he was writing when the dropoff was at .13 runs per game):

He calls himself "the pebble that started the avalanche," the man who taught baseball…
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From 1901 to 2009, which is 108 back-to-back seasons, there have been 36 times that the runs per game dropped by at least 0.13 runs per game. There have been 31 times that the runs per game increased by at least 0.13 runs per game. And another 41 times where the runs per game was within 0.13 runs per game. That we are currently witnessing a drop of 0.13 runs per game (with still 3 months to go, and still summer months to enjoy) is about as non-story as there is, other than the people's desire to look for streak stories, or hot-and-cold stories.

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The drop is around the 33rd percentile (or 67th percentile, depending on your perspective). A story is when something is at the 95th or 99th percentile.

From 2004-2006, the runs per game went from 4.81 to 4.59 to 4.86.

From 2000-2002, it dropped by 0.52 runs in two seasons.

From 1987-1988, it dropped by 0.58 runs in one season, after previously increasing by 0.31 runs per game.

1976-79: 3.99 to 4.47 to 4.10 to 4.46. THOSE are big changes.

And the real "year of the pitcher" changes: 1962-1963: drop of 0.51 runs per game 1968-69: increase of 0.65 runs per game, followed by another 0.27 runs per game.

What's happening appears to be random variance, but fans are more than happy to adduce these numbers to various unrelated arguments about PEDs or pitcher abuse or baseball's newfound appreciation of defense. The year of the pitcher is really the year of people looking at the clouds and swearing they see shapes.